The Nighttime Before Wednesday

I got out of bed at 11 only so that I could say, “good morning,” without lying. My friend and I have been staying with four polish girls for the last three nights. We sleep on a futon, in sleeping bags, and under blankets, and the girls laugh at us because we sleep cocooned, like Florida Boys in Poland. We wake up to the ambient hummings of the sounds of easy morning music, wood popcorning in the fire, and small polish feet carrying giggles around on tip-toes.

*

We’ve discovered a similarity of soul, we and these couchsurfing hosts.

*

Snow fell outside, the bathroom floor was heated, and breakfast was already made: cheese and tomatoes on bread, with tea, and eggs colored by chopped peppers. We decorated the bread on our plates, one piece at a time. We added hot water to our almost finished cups of tea, and because it was breakfast, we sometimes laughed about yesterday, and sometimes were quiet about today.

The polish girls went to class and work. We rinsed dirty dishes and swept the floor. My friend researched our next travel move, and I sat on the small porch writing for other travelers. I shaved, and then cleaned my hair from the sink for twice as long as I had shaved.

One of our hosts came home for lunch, we talked about the class that she had just been to, and then the one that she would go to next. Then she read for her next class, my friend held his head in his hand and wrote in his journal, and I read. One host left for her next class, and two others burst in the door from their last.  They laughed with each other, chattered in Polish, hurried my friend and I along, and then, at the door, asked; “Scarf? Camera? Wallet? Cigarettes? Lighter? And we showed off the one or two items that we’d remembered as we searched around for the ones that we would have complained about forgetting.  

My friend and I walked long-legged through the cold to the bus stop. Our cute hostesses bounced along, ahead, arm in arm, and turned to share their polish jokes in our English.  We all crammed on a bus, fell backwards and forwards for twenty minutes, and hurried off.

The girls led us down a street that remained urban for a block before developing quickly into woods patched with the season’s first snow. We climbed a muddy hill, stumbled down a muddier hill, and sat on rocks over a local secret; a blue-green lake far below limestone cliffs. We sat for a bit, had a cigarette, and returned without the help of the day.

We took the bus to Krakow’s, “Jewish District,” had a local specialty snack, (Toast with mozzarella, garlic, tomatoes, and olives on top. It was somehow great), and then we had tea and coffee at a snug shop where we sat on wooden chairs with fluffy cushions, and talked about what it feels like to be a proud Pole.

We went home and ate the pumpkin soup that had been prepared for us. My friend and I went to a late-night café, and our hosts’ movie was finished when we returned. We listened to our favorite songs and quietly watched their videos play through the projector, against a white wall.

Finally, to deter sleep, and so that we might know as much about the people hosting us as we did about our hosts', we asked them to tell us what events of the last half-decade had made them into the people that we knew. This is what they said:

1: “I came back to Poland and there was nothing for me. My parents were not like they are now, and home is not peaceful at this time. I had no desire or option, and I was just stuck with the winter coming, the sky gray, and only fields outside of my window. Finally, I was with my sister, and she told me about a dream that she had about me. She said that I was glowing in the dream, and that I was good, and that I was taking care of her. And then we talked over everything and I don’t know why but we cried. I told her about a memory I have about falling when I was learning to walk. It was about when I had one year only, and still I remembered it, and I fell while trying to walk beneath a tree. I remember still that the tree and sky were in my sight, and that everything was good. I know that it was something good. The good was taking care of me, from being all around me, and I just knew that it was my soul outside of me, or able to be reached from all of the outside of me, and I just know that it was making safe for me.

We went outside on the porch after talking over all things, and we knew that we understood everything in this time.  I was 18 and so was my twin sister. We were in the outside of that place, I remember, I was with my hat against my face for the tears, and my sister for some reason, I do not know why and neither does she, she went and got from a costume the wings of an angel and she put them on me. We saw the trees moving in the wind and we know that they are in pain, but we know that they are good. I say that this is the time when I say that I know my soul.”

2: “It was in high school and I was new and I was in the first class and I met a girl who is my friend. Others peoples say that we seven girls are a group of friends, the first girl and me and these girls, but there was this situation, and then we were all hating each other. But we were already by the other people thought to be together as seven, so we were stuck but we were not kind. I started to party, and change boyfriends, and I was like you would say a ghost. I fought with my parents, I moved out from with my parents, and we were not talking for 3 years. I was not happy with myself. Living alone was not right for me. But I wanted it to change, so I walked the streets of the city to be out of just being alone. Then I took this graduation test that I passed very well, and I thought that I could for the first time be good at something. It was then that I began my university studies and I met people that were like, “you are as you are.” The people in my studies accept me. “

And then my friend and I shared, and then we moved chairs around and made the sofa into a futon. For a few moments 1 took pictures and 2 drew designs. Now they are asleep. It is like the good around a fallen baby. 

Cities are for The Sleepless

There’s a quiet affliction amongst some of us. It’s not insomnia, but it’s something like it. It’s this daily acceleration of a searching desire—it’s growing and growing as the sun speeds to the top of the sky, stalls through the early afternoon, and then plummets through the earth. We grow more and more hungry, more and more anxious, and more and more desperate. We are the ones who don’t let the night end. We sit on porches listening to the night’s noises, thinking about those who are asleep, and reaching out to those who are still awake. We pace paths into the concrete, we read “the internet,” and we get lost in the epic love stories of Russian literature. We are The Restless, and we’re different than you.

*

I have a stupid theory about The Restless, and like many other stupid theories, it has to do with video games:

When playing a video game, there is a “difficulty” option available. This allows game-players of lesser skill the opportunity to lower the “difficulty level,” so that they may beat the game and save the world from aliens or terrorists or zombies or Nazis. This is, after all, the point of video games. We’re a generation full of world savers who are retreating to our alternate realities with each failed attempt to save the world that we live in. We dream of moments in the hospital, with the popular girl at our side, (we saved her) and we’ve exceeded all of the expectations placed upon us. Our parents are proud, the popular girl is in love, and we managed to somehow suffer injuries that do not affect our faces or testicles. We can win in video games, and it’s because the producers of video games understand us, that they gave us the option to lower the “difficulty setting.”

Anyway, The Restless are the world savers who are retreating to our alternate realities with each failed attempt to save the real world that we live in.

We welcome the brief respites from the reality of our self-perceived insignificance. And we all stay awake later than anyone around us, walking the streets in the rain so that god and man might know that we’re still giving that particular day a go of it. Our perseverance, our sleeplessness, is the badge awarded for our valiance.

It is never too late for us to go to waffle house. It is never to late for a coffee. It is never too late to chat with far-away people on facebook. It is never too late for anything because we roam the empty streets of a city knowing that we’ve taken victory over everyone who’s fallen asleep, everyone who’s conceded that “tonight,” is “just another night.”

We are the restless.

*

I used to say that I haven’t fallen in love, but I know now that, that isn’t true. I’ve fallen in love quite a few times. I’ve fallen in love with romances that never happened, I’ve fallen in love with girlfriends who searched my face for myself, and I’ve fallen in love with the girls who pass only with eye-contact and a recognition of similarity. I’ve walked the streets of a city after the living are asleep and I’ve run into you. I’ve stood in the rain because I need proof that I feel it, I’ve wished that I were different for sake of the people who love me, and I’ve maintained an ever-present departure date to discourage their investment.

I almost disappeared this last year. Or maybe I did. I heard older voices discourage my voice and my being who I am, and I dedicated myself to becoming a different, more acceptable, person. I lost a friend. I drove the dead, visited the dead, and shook the hands of the parents of the dead. I watched the poor be turned away because they couldn’t be helped, and I turned away for the same reason.

I learned the bible in my head and the church in my heart and I became more convinced of my inability to become adequate. I learned Dostoyevsky in my head and Breaking Bad in my heart, and I became more convinced of my inability to become adequate. I learned the love of a woman in my head and the breaking of her heart, in my heart, and I became more convinced of my inability to become adequate.

Being loved and being involved at a church are the two best ways to affirm your disappointment with your own character.

But I’ve found community amongst The Restless. We wonder whether our movement is a trait or a phase, we drink late into the night, and find the most magnificent stimulus that earth offers—because it is those stimuli alone that draw our attention away from the confusing and alluring nature of our own interpersonal quandaries.

Tonight, I tipped the kabob vender as much as the kabob cost because I was out beyond the time of the living. Tonight, I walked blocks and blocks before I realized that I had, because I was out beyond the time of the living. Tonight, I wrote about being awake beyond the living because I was awake beyond the time that the living retreated.

Some will think that this was a typed piece by a falling person, but some will think that they aren’t alone.

I’ve been gaining confidence.

I’ve received emails and messages from The Restless, and they say that they are with me. They say that they are not “they” and myself, “I,” but that we are the same. And it is for they that I write. The happily married, the well adjusted, and the gainfully employed are fine as it is. I no longer write for my vain aspirations of success, but for the few close Restless ones who read the pieces posted late at night and say, “I am not alone in this.” And I write so that I will hear The Restless say, “You are not alone in this.”

It’s true, that tonight, eventually, I will go to sleep. My insanity will grow as weary as my body and I will lie somewhere until I dream of being the hero that I’m not. The “difficulty setting” is simply to high for some of us. For myself. We’ll play, and we’ll try, but we just wont beat the game.

But I say that we are heroes. I say that there is something to the playing of the game at a level more difficult than possible. I love the mad ones, the ones who live and die failed heroes. Keep grinding heroes. Keep falling in love with the eyes you make contact with, with the ideas that you don’t pursue, and with the necessarily fictional versions of yourselves. Walk the city streets made for the sleepless and claim victory over those who have retreated.     

Growing Up is Funny

My sister recently sent me a video of my baby niece battling her biped-way from the sofa to my sister. She stumbled, used her hands for balance, and then gloated with a proud smile when she finally fell to my sister. I watched the video from a flat in Copenhagen, smiling and audibly cheering. I was happy for just about three seconds. That’s how long that it took to remember that I don’t want my niece to be able to move around. I want my niece to slide about a very little bit, to sit in chairs that she can’t get out of, and to eat a lot. I want her to be able to do these things, to be able to do no other things, and to do these things forever. These are safe things.

Isn’t that mentality sad? Wouldn’t it be grad if we watched all first steps, all grace-less beginnings, with such joy and cheer?

Me “finding myself” has been like an unsupervised toddler learning to walk. Yeah, it’s great when a kid learns to walk. The kid can’t drag ass forever. It’d be impractical, and worse, weird. There are, however, about billion new ways that a mobile kid can screw up. And just like all new walkers, when I discovered myself, or more accurately, discovered that I had a “self” to discover, I behaved like a champion, I scoffed at any notion that I might not be a perfect expert in my new skill, and then I walked my face into the first coffee table that I could find.

I recently had an epiphany. “Self,” I said, “there is a pattern here.”  

When I call the credit card company because I can’t figure out how to pay a bill, or when I’m asking a secretary how to fill out my own W-2, (it only works on women), I have a little thing that I say. I say it because it gets me help, but in this rare instance, I also say it because it’s true: “I’m a child in an adult world.”

And I am!

Each time I’ve done something new, I’ve done it clumsily. But for some reason, I continue to be astonished at my struggles. And honestly, other people seem to be surprised too. But why?

My young niece didn’t skip or dance across the room. She shakily stumbled. Yeah, she’ll one day be the most modest and talented dancer ever, but as of now, I’m just proud of her steps. I loved her and I cheered for her. What an idea.

I’ve decided to stop loathing myself for my stumbling and head knocking. I’m not sure what I’ve expected of myself, or what expectation of others I’ve undertaken, but this is me looking back at them as if through the awkwardly cut and narrated videos of my early childhood. This is me chasing the folly of a freedom forgotten. This is my bare ass, displayed in the face of my own self-assumed seriousness—and yours too. The stumbling steps of a new walker are natural. So too are the stumbling steps of adolescence, college, or young adulthood. Here’s some video of my own silly stumbles:

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New to School

In first grade, shortly after my parents paid for me to enroll in a private school in Macon, Georgia, I had to move my “Behavior Card” from green to red. I had to move my card because Ford Baggerly and I put ice in our pants. Ford Baggerly and I put ice in out pants because there was a girl named Jean who was mean. Jean was mean because her parents, by naming her “Jean”, had made it embarrassingly obvious that they despised her.

So, when Ford Baggerly and I put ice in our pants to gross-out Mean Jean, she told Mrs. Horn. When Mrs. Horn found out what Ford Baggerly and I had done, or more accurately, when Mrs. Horn was made aware of what we had done by our own demonstration of what had done—a demonstration, which we conducted by actually putting ice down our pants again—she made us move our cards from green to red.

Red is the color for the kids who are dolts.

But I don’t have a card to move anymore, and I’m betting Jean’s name is still “Jean”.

New to Independent Mobility: Version 1

Speaking of public school…I was allowed to ride my bike to school in 8^th grade. And by “allowed,” I mean that my parents made me ride my bike to school because I had withheld certain facts from them. And by “withheld certain facts,” I mean that I told my parents that I had basketball practice for a team that I wasn’t even on, so that they wouldn’t know that I actually had been given detention by Ms. Sawcyn for “treating the lesson as if it were a rude distraction from his own conversation.” Her words. I signed the note using my mom’s words, or at least her name, duh. 

Anyway, I ran into my friends’ mom as I was walking into detention. She asked me what I was doing at school so early, and I, of course, told her that I was there “to humor Ms. Sawcyn’s vanity.” And so, as things have pretty much always seemed to go, my friends’ mom went to Publix, found herself in the “Sauces” isle with my mom, and joked to my mom about my comment regarding Ms. Sawcyn. They apparently, really did regard her as being vain.

The humor was lost upon my mother.

We had some rules in our house, but the most important one to my mom was that we should always tell the truth. Unfortunately, I literally cannot understand why anyone would “always tell the truth.” My incompetence is not unfortunate because of the moral consequence, or even because of my mom’s wrath, but because another rule amongst my dad, brother and I, is that anyone who upsets Mamma Bird should be destroyed.

So that was when my parents decided to “allow” me to ride my bike to and from school. And to church. And to baseball practice. And anywhere else that I should should need to go.

I’m a lot of things that I wish that I wasn’t, and I’m not a lot of things that I wish that I was, but one of the things that I am, that I’m okay with being, is buoyant. Not exactly resilient, but buoyant. I just seem to keep popping back up to the surface. Just when the bubbles have stopped popping the surface and everyone around figures that I finally sank for good; bloop. There I am, bouncing around on top of the surface. I didn’t get there by scratching and clawing, or willing and working, but was just sort of shot up by some inherent property.

So, being a buoyant fellow, I met a young lovely on the bike path, made jokes for a couple of weeks, and then was permitted to touch her boobs. And yes, relative to her eighth-grade peers, she had some wonderful boobs. A real good pair of “oh my god, I’m touching boobs,” boobs.

A touch over one week after touching, I found myself in a circle of kids, behind the Walmart, getting punched in the face by The Boob’s Ecuadorian boyfriend. At the time I was still unfamiliar with the various advantages and disadvantages of differing socio-economic situation. If I had understood these advantages and disadvantages, I would not have ridden my bike from my house on the river to “fight” the Ecuadorian Boyfriend who rode his bike from the projects. But he was a good Ecuadorian Boyfriend. The perfect, “oh god, I’m getting punched in the face by an Ecuadorian Boyfriend,” Ecuadorian Boyfriend.

Ecuadorian Boyfriend was last seen working at a gas station. I, on the other hand, am growing my own boobs that I can touch whenever I please.

Boom. Buoyant.

New to Independent Mobility: Version 2

It is impossible to recount the myriad of “mistake” that I made with the freedom of the road. There isn’t a person alive who more enjoys driving, nor is there a person alive who has more abused it. I love it. It’s where I’m the best me. As a person, I’m sort of always going towards someplace and leaving some other place, and when I’m driving I feel like I can, at any moment, in response to any whim, go anywhere. I have an awful car, or at least that’s what you think, but it has so, so much passion. The Neon has never let me down, only I, her. The back two doors don’t have power locks or windows, the seat isn’t “attached” at all, to anything, water leaks into the car from the bottom, the floor mats have been missing for half of a decade, and the shifter is a moronic-metallic-sparkly blue. Basically, The Neon rules. And it’s because of The Neon’s flawless character that I must separate her from all of my vehicular transgressions.

Speaking of those transgressions: I’m not sure if I got my first speeding ticket the first time that I drove, but if I didn’t, it was the second or third. I’ve gotten tickets in six states, and I’ve gotten multiple tickets without leaving the car. I have never been pulled over and not been given a ticket. I’ve also been ticketed for expired tags, failure to stop at a stop sign, ineffective taillight, and of course, for misunderstanding, “don’t drink before driving” as “don’t drive before drinking.”

Driving hasn’t been all stumbles though.

When my best friend’s, girlfriend’s, sister was making a comparison list between her current boyfriend, (who was in a band, better looking than me, funnier than me, and her boyfriend, but a non-car-owner), and myself, I won. She later admitted the list to me, and upon our break-up, informed me that my ability to drive was just about all that I had going for me.

A year after that, being an older and wiser dumb-teenager, I started to keep a blow-up mattress in my trunk so that I could stay out past curfew and chase girls. I never managed to talk a girl into my accommodations, but I did once end up sharing the mattress, which extended from the back of the trunk to the front seats, with two other dudes. So there’s that.

And lastly, my best friend and I went on an epic road trip around the U.S., in The Neon. We tried to ruin her but we couldn’t.

I have a rap-sheet, car-insurance like a mortgage, and experience in jail, but I also have The Neon.

Buoyant.

New to Drinking

Scott Van Pelt, who hosts a daily radio show, often references the term, “Sunday Weird’s.” The term is used as a synoptic tool. There are some “Sunday’s,” or “day-after,” days, that fall into the category of the “Sunday Weird’s.” These are those days when someone, usually between the ages of 18 and 26, wakes up, and immediately thinks, “Weird.”

I will not catalogue the litany of alcohol-related screw-ups that checker my life because I’m no dumber than you are. But I will share a bit of a shameful “Sunday Weird’s” experience:

Study Abroad Center. Valencia, Spain.

I wake up and someone’s next to me. I think, “weird.” I put on my clothes but can’t find my pants. I think, “weird.” I check another room in the same apartment, (an apartment which is not my own), and I cannot find my pants there, but I do find my belt. I think, “weird.” I check the bathroom, a girl is in the shower, she screams, I say, “relax, its not a big deal,” and she tells me that she’ll “bight my balls off” if she ever sees me again. I think, “weird.” I walk down the stairs to my apartment, can’t get into my apartment because my key is in the pocket of my missing pants, I walk all the way down the stairs to the desk clerk, I explain the situation to the clerk, the clerk says that it’s not the weirdest thing he’s seen this morning, and lets me into my apartment where I find someone else’s pants on my floor. I think, “weird.”

I found my pants and don’t have any children or diseases.

Buoyant.

New to: Paying Taxes, Working, Being the Smallest Piece of Shit on The Organizational Chart

 This is the newest of the, “New Responsibility and Mobiliy,” experiences that I’ve encountered. This one sucks. The last year was worse than having to watch this season’s Auburn football team play on a continuous loop while laying in snow while naked. As if having to go to work weren’t enough, these people in the working world don’t understand how big of a deal we were in college. They don’t know that we dated people that a lot of other people wanted to date. They don’t know that our gamer-tag’s strike fear into the hearts of adolescents across the Internet. The suits don’t understand what sort of discipline that it takes to manage a four-hour trip to the library without neglecting one second of social posturing for sake of the distractions of our education.

I have watched the entire “Lord of The Rings” trilogy, made out with Miss Auburn, smoked a cigar, gone undefeated in corn-hole, smoked another cigar, eaten beer, drink-en Ramen, and written a paper that made my prof’s eyes bleed, all in the same day.

Those aren’t the stats of a guy who goes undrafted. Those are, Daniel Snyder sell all the shit you got so you can draft that guy, stats.

And yet, here I sit. Running away. Everything about me has had its ass kicked this last year, and now I’m posting embarrassing things on the Internet while sober. I’m hopeful though, because I’m buoyant.

*

They say that we’re “lost.” But we know we’re not. The inherent force that only we know about is growing more and more resistant to the outside forces pushing us further downwards. The moment is coming, and maybe already has, when the compassionate heart of our submerged generation will rise more rapidly than the commentary upon it, and explode far beyond the Gravity-Bound. Keep believing that you’re not as dumb as it all makes you feel. Keep the naïveté that feeds your hope for making a better world. We will rise.

We’re buoyant.  

More Than a "Good Time"

More Than a Good Time

There was a fellow who observed an astrological event about one hundred years ago. He saw that Venus, (or some other planet that is still a planet—I’m not quite sure which), was crossing between the earth and the sun. He came about some money and built an observatory called, Radcliffe Observatory, so that he could watch this planet do this thing over and over again until he learned something.  It was into the construction of the building and the acquisition of the necessary tools that he plunged everything that he had.

As it turns out, the event for which he built the observatory to observe, the criss-crossing of some planet, is something that only occurs every one hundred years. Surely, he must have known that there was a possibility that his pet event might be, for his lifetime, and anomaly. And surely, after a few nights of the thing that he thought would happen, not happening, he found other things in the vastness of space for his gaze to be set upon. But our observer did one-day die. And it was most probably while watching something not happen through his own, costly scope, on top of his own, grand building, with little satisfaction and much confusion.

This past June, the thing our observer had been watching for, happened. Far beneath the cyclical movement of planets, the students of Green Templeton College, at Oxford, sat in a common room full of cushioned couches and arm-chairs, while pattering upon keyboards, running their fingers along lines of text, and sipping tea. Learning and pushing and striving, these young souls with young minds, the talents of our generation, the great healers, inventors, and helpers to come—all traveling along their own curious orbits in the renovated and converted, Radcliffe Observatory. A building built by mistake. Our observer was wrong, but what this common room is, what his observatory has become, the room in which I now type, is right.

*

I recently asked a few friends to tell me “what they know now that they didn’t know before.” I did little explaining so that the answers wouldn’t be influenced at all. One friend, a new father, said that he knows now that being a man has little to do with his body having reached maturity, but much more to do with putting coffee on after a 14 hour day, so that he can be the one to “get the baby” during the night. A different friend said that birth control and condoms are both frustrating. And another friend said that he wasn’t sure how to say it, but “the whole seasons of life thing is starting to make more sense.”

I think that I’m in the second season of my life. I had one, from about 3 months old until February sixth of 2010, and another from then through now. During the first season I came home and dinner was ready, I played video games, and I rode my bike along with friends to Number 1 Chinese. The second season, which, unfortunately, is still in progress, has been a bunch of not sleeping, pacing on porches late at night, and being unable to read or write anything more interpersonally taxing than “See Spot Run, See Spot Walk.” I wrote something a couple of days ago that has been replaced by this thing that I’m writing right now. The scrapped post was, I think decent, but the only people who read this are in my family, and they would either be worried or whisper about my parents’ crazy son. It wasn’t happy. In fact, I think the reason that I haven’t written in a bit is because anything that I could have written, if I could write, would have been wearingly heavy for anyone to read. And it’s embarrassing. My skill may have developed, but not as rapidly as my fear of shame.  

I’m tired of my fear and I miss my fearlessness. Maybe I romanticize the past, but if I don’t, then I truly have lost my heart for the marginalized, my capacity to “go there,” into the deepest and darkest of states and thoughts so I might be able to write something familiar to those who have been there, and the security of a faith believed in and a for hope of a world that could be changed.

Is this a thing that happens after college? Is this a thing that happens to the “lost generation?” Is this a thing that is only happening to me?

I once spoke to people that I didn’t know, flirted with girls that I thought were cute, wrote pieces that, if nothing else, were at least honest, and at least felt like I was moving somewhere. Now, I’m a number, an “any person”, and empty thing. I’ve lost my passions and my talents. I’ve lost my motivation and my competency. I say that “I’ve lost” them, but I feel like they’ve been taken from me. I charge God with the man that the world has made me, and I resent him for being the maker of the world that has made me as I am. I accept less responsibility than I should, but that too I am ashamed of and feel powerless over.

I leave a day before I say that I will, I look into teary eyes without emotion, and I’m loved but cannot love back. I’m like the most emo of emo songs, Im a cliché that doesn’t know it, I’m a half assed Christian and a half assed non-christian. I can laugh and charm and chat, but I hate it and have little energy for it. I don’t care where people are from or what they do as a job, I only want to know the things that should be saved for special people. Don’t tell me what you’re favorite color is, tell me why you wear baggy sweatshirts to hide your body. Tell me why you silence the calls that are from your brother. Tell me why you’re travelling or tell me why you’re not.

I’m tired of discussion, the noises of conversation, and the way things are going. Change something. Stick with me beyond the moment when I ask you not to. Present some friction. Or don’t. But if you don’t, will you at least hold my tired head and my tired person in your lap? Be there when I want a lap to rest my head upon and be okay with me not resting my head upon your lap when you wish that I would? Tell me that I’m “okay.” Tell me that I can change things, and tell me that I can win the argument for purpose, and tell me that the existential camp is wrong? Or tell me nothing, “hold me fast,” and slide your hands through my hair. I miss my old girlfriends because by being my girlfriend, they said, “You are okay.” I miss my home because I’m better at sleeping when there.  I miss myself from before. I think that self was starting to build an observatory. I may have been wrong, but it could have been right, eventually.

*

I’m waltzing again, and again, for so much more than a “good time.” I need so much more than a “good time.” I’ll be damned if I spend all of my money on bad beds and bad food for nothing more jollies. And this is where I think that many of my peers can meet me. We are “hopeless wanderers,” moving away from things that are more easily described than those that we are running towards. Job to job, city to city, social cause to social cause. We have within our experiences the greatest exposure socially and geographically ever available to man. The age disparity between the boomers who birthed us and ourselves is, again, the greatest ever. And we are single till later, and a part of more ended romantic relationships than ever before. (See CNN “Lost Generation” for fact check.)

Lonely people surround us all. I wonder if our restless wandering is in search of a unity that facebook and transit have forever stolen. I wonder if, for me at least, this is why I want to be held fast, held when I try to leave, held when you know that even though I’m in your arms, I’m not with you.